The making of an open and democratic Europe: reading Brexit through E.P. Thompson

There is no room for Britain’s turning away from Europe to a
fantasy mid-Atlantic or neo-Commonwealth position of the kind floated,
typically unseriously, by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

William Morris printed textile, Strawberry thief, 1883. Wikicommons. Public domain.It is said that the Brexiteers have the identity side of the
debate sown up. The British, or at least the English, do not feel European. We have our history as a
proud, island people - they, on the Continent, have very different traditions.
It is remarkable how this myth has taken root, although the English, Scots,
Welsh and Northern Irish so obviously share common linguistic, cultural and
indeed political roots with other Europeans, and when the whole recorded
history of our islands has been so bound up with the Continent. It is
particularly outrageous since so many British people have given their lives
over the last century, not so that we can retreat into Little England but so
that Europe can be free and democratic.

Britain’s post-imperial delusions have been the main reason for
blindness to this history. When the Common Market was first proposed, many on
the left not only saw it as a capitalist club, but believed that Great Britain
remained powerful enough to stand alone as a social democracy, or at least that
the renovated Commonwealth could provide sufficient international support. The
French president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, is generally
credited with puncturing these illusions (which Thatcherism had already
undermined) with his speech to the Trades Union Congress in 1988. However the
ground had really been broken by the remarkable movement for European Nuclear
Disarmament (END) which was launched in 1980, and above all in the speeches and
writings of E.P. Thompson.

Edward Thompson was the great historian of the English working class and of those
quintessentially English radical thinkers, William Morris and William Blake. He
had famous spats with compatriots whom he saw as insufficiently attentive to
‘the peculiarities of the English’, and with a French philosopher whose grand
theory seemed, to him, insufficiently grounded in the very English medium of
empirical reality. And yet his political passion as a leader of END was not
just to end the Cold War, or to remove nuclear weapons, but to unify Europe.
Indeed he saw European unity, achieved through popular movements from below as
well as through agreement between states, as the key to peace and disarmament.

Unlike some younger disarmers, Edward saw a direct link between
Europe’s armed liberation from fascism in 1944-45 and the peaceful liberation
from the Cold War blocs which END proposed. The first liberation was very
personal to him, and not only because at the age of 20 he had fought through
the Italian peninsula in the last year of the world war (he had very mixed
feelings about the military experience, explored in his moving essay,‘The
LIberation of Perugia’). More importantly, his elder brother Frank had been
executed while fighting with Bulgarian resistance fighters in 1944, giving his
life, as Edward saw it, for a free and democratic Europe.

In the early 1980s, Britons like other Europeans faced another
existential threat, compared to which the worst failures of today’s EU
bureaucracy pale into insignificance. ‘We Europeans are packed into this small
continent,’ Edward noted, while the Warsaw Pact and NATO targeted multiple
nuclear warheads at each and every city. (Some of the atmosphere of the time
was conveyed in the recent TV drama, Deutschland
83.) Starting from a British base, Edward and his comrades pursued a
single-minded strategy not just of linking the burgeoning West European peace
movements with each other, but also of engaging these movements with the
pressure for democracy in Eastern Europe. This goal set END apart from those in
CND who saw removing nuclear weapons as the ultimate goal, and put it on a
collision course with Stalinists who objected only to western nuclear systems.

It was a visionary strategy, set out in Thompson’s 1981
lecture, Beyond the Cold War. When
first proposed, there were millions protesting NATO missiles on the streets of
West European capitals, but apart from Solidarity in Poland (primarily a free
trade union, and crushed by a military coup in late 1981), Eastern Europe had
only small numbers of open dissidents. Many of them were suspicious of western
peaceniks. Yet the end of the 1980s saw millions on the streets of Eastern
European capitals, calling for democracy and bringing an end to the division of
Europe in essentially the way that Edward and END foresaw. It helped, of
course, that Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union, and that
he and Ronald Reagan began a rapprochement
that was unimagineable in 1981, but both of these developments were partly
enabled by the peace movements.

After the dramatic revolutions of 1989, not even Margaret
Thatcher, and certainly not the British Labour Party, could withstand the
European tide. The new Europe had many flaws – new nationalist parties replaced
civil society movements in the east, the west helped foist privatisation on the
former Communist countries, NATO expanded and increasingly alienated Russia,
and a currency bloc was launched which could not withstand the full-blown
financial crisis which spread from the United States in 2008. But in the 1990s
and early 2000s, the European idea was strong. The German and French
governments even stood out against George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of
Iraq in 2003.

Edward Thompson died in 1993, much exercised by the terrible
new wars in the Balkans. The new Europe he envisaged was certainly much more
than the EU of the national leaders and bureaucrats, of whose limitations
Yugoslavia was an early indication. But their EU expansion was only possible
because of how the popular movements ended the Cold War, very much as he had
hoped and foreseen.

Doubtless Thompson, if he were alive today, would rail against
the shameful failure of the EU to live up to its obligations to refugees and
the vindictive policies of the Eurozone towards Greece. I am sure he would
excoriate David Cameron for his abdication of Britain’s responsibility for
Europe’s refugees, and I can imagine a withering dissection of the Prime
Minister’s ‘renegotiation’ of migrant workers’ rights.

But Thompson’s vision leaves no room for Britain’s turning away
from Europe to a fantasy mid-Atlantic or neo-Commonwealth position of the kind
floated, typically unseriously, by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The slogan
of the progressive pro-EU campaign group, Another Europe is Possible, sums up
what Edward was saying in the 1980s in his campaign against the Cold War
division of the continent. We have to remain part of the European Union to make
a better kind of Europe possible.

About the author

Martin Shaw is a
Professorial Fellow in International Relations and Human Rights at the
University of Roehampton and a Research Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis
Internacionals. He is also an Independent County Councillor in Devon.

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